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Talk:Campaigns Wikia
No idea where to comment, so I guess this will have to do for now. We should probably have some categorisation throughout the campaigns. I suppose a "Campaigns by country; State; Province; Region; District; etc" broken down into some sort of Party system would be good. That way, if I want to know what other, say, Green Party candidates are running for the U.S. House of Representatives from Montana, I could easily find them. Or if I wanted to, say, find all the candidates running for MP from Bromsgrove, they would all be in one location. Is there something like this already in mind? --Lord Voldemort (Dark Mark) 20:20, 5 July 2006 (UTC) That sounds like a good idea. Categories are probably the easiest tool to use for this, but of course categories presuppose the existence of articles... What I have been thinking about is that we will probably have two distinct sorts of things here: first a set of general philosophical and pratical discussions about things like: how to get active in a campaign and convince them that this stuff matters... this kind of discussion applies to everyone. Second, an index to campaigns, including stuff about every candidate we can find, something like NPOV articles about them plus probably NPOV-ish pages which sum up the arguments PRO and CON for each candidate.--Jimbo Wales 20:43, 5 July 2006 (UTC) A Different way to organize... In addition to organizing Campaigns Wikia by topics (International Affairs, Education, Civil Rights) etc., with attendant sub-topics, we may want to consider a temporal organization approach as well. By that I mean setting up chronological templates like 2010, 2015, 2020 etc., where Wikia members can contribute their thoughts on the issues that are likely to be most pressing for the country BY THAT time-frame. The idea behind this is simple. Most of the imperatives that drive political discussions by politicians and the media, are driven by short-term political time-tables, like the upcoming mid-term elections, or the next Presidential elections. They're then debated through the filters of the right and the left (or the left and the right, depending on your perspective). Even when we discuss major issues like immigration, education, etc., we're really talking about them in 2-4 year time frames. And while politicians and the media talk about issues like Social Security in the longer term, due to the nature of the issue, they're talked about in the context of the issue itself, BUT NOT in conjunction with other issues like immigration, education, trade relations with China/India, etc., that are likely going to influence Social Security in the long term. When you think about it, we have no political or media institution that really has a stake in nurturing discussion and debates on truly long-term issues, especially ones that are not influenced by near-term politics. At least in the area of economics and the judiciary, we've created institutions like the Federal Reserve and the Supreme Court that truly deliberate on issues and policies for the truly long-term, independent of near-term politicla agendas. We need to have a similar discussion template for discussing today's issues in the context of tomorrow. Truly representative representatives Excellant idea, I and a friend of mine have been discussing for some time, at great length whether the internet could help augment the lack of true representation provided by our government officials. Along with the organizational ideas, we had discussed organizing content according to representative district so it would be easy for someone to follow local/state/national politics on a topic/representative organization relative to their locale. Organization :Organizing this is going to be interesting. How will people want to find candidates? Obviously there will be the need to drill down by location. Additionally, people might want to drill-down by issue, and they might want to do so within a location (e.g., California-based candidates relating to firearms regulation issues), which will be tricky, but necessary (after all, most people in a particular country may not care what people in other countries are doing on that issue, and looking at death-penalty positions across the globe will be too much noise to filter through). :Chronological organization will also be tough, with regards to people wanting to drill down through historical campaigns on various issues. But I'm not sure how much this wants to become a historical resource--I doubt people will be in favor of retroactively adding campaigns from the past; part of the interest in this project will be in capturing the campaign coverage at the time of the campaign. :Additionally, we'll want some way to organize citations. Perhaps we can have a comprehensive list of citations relating to every candidate on their wiki. E.g., anything anyone was quoted as saying in the NY Times should be filed somewhere. How much effort will we try to put in this central wiki to effect policy on the campaign wikis. Should they all follow similar organizational principles, or are they essentially free-for-alls? :Just throwing out some topics/concerns. Jun-Dai 22:27, 5 July 2006 (UTC) new and confused Wow, is the right time for this site. I probably don't fit your profile, I'm much older and a grammar grump but I can't believe the way we, the people, are losing control of our government. The media isn't biased, it's doing just what the people want. Making it short, sweet and untrue. The truth takes so looong!! I don't even know how to blog and this is the first time I've written (and I hope this is a blog) but we all need to start somewhere. What would be a good beginning topic? Let's tak...ummm....better slogans? Not "cut and run", let's do "learn and live"!! Let's find a way to give people the news in a short amount of time. But let's make sure it's the truth. Let's not give both sides, let's just talk true. Could this work? Organizing Wiki site by both topics and political/geographic areas As someone who has done grassroots organizing in California (eg: California for Democacy, San Francisco for Democracy) I recommend that in addition to organizing by topics, pages which are organized first by State and then by Congressional District be created as well. There's an enormous workload of keeping track of who is running in what congressional districts, which districts might be singled out for special attention by opposing parties (eg: in California grassroots groups have an organized campaign "to take back red California" on a district-by-disctrict by district basis) and what the big issues are for that distict. Although I assume this new Wiki site can't allow itself to become a partisan tool, I envision individual pages for each Congressional district which would accomplish two purposes: inform everybody about the basics (who's the incumbent, who are the challengers, what are the recent voter trends). All that stuff would be NPOV. Then, if Wikipedia will allow this as a matter of policy, individual editors could add postings about the pros and cons of each candidate. Although these posting would not be NPOV, they would have to abide by other Wikipedia rules such as assume good faith, no personal attacks, provide verification for any claimed facts, etc. --Tom Brown 23:46, 5 July 2006 (UTC) Independent subwikis :If we're going to have subwikis for individual candidates, would it make sense to also have subwikis for: :# Political parties :# Referendum issues (e.g., prop 187) :# Nations and/or provinces? languages? (how do we intend to deal with languages, btw?) :Is it really necessary/relevant to have a separate wiki for each candidate? what purpose does that serve? :Just throwing more questions into the air. :Jun-Dai 00:08, 6 July 2006 (UTC) ::I agree with you. As I suggest above, it would be more meaningful to have subwikis by states and congressional districts (for the US). Just having stand alone candidate pages doesn't make sense IMHO. What would really be nice is to have a home-page map of the US (or maybe the world?) which would allow you to click on your own area. --Tom Brown 00:28, 6 July 2006 (UTC) PS: Here's an example of a clickable US map done by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. DCCC Confusion Let's look at the gay marriage topic here in our new wonderland. There are seven opinions, all of which have very little to do with each other, as though the posters simply wanted to get off their chests some sort of devastating defeat to whichever side they disagree with. If it continues down that line, it will become chaotic, unintelligible, and increasingly more idiotic. These people's opinions are, for the most part, valid, but there absolutely must be a structure to articles like that. My problem is this: What exactly is the difference between campaigns.wiki, and wikipedia? If I go to wikipedia, I can read a full, incredibly done article on Same-Sex marriage with links and great information abound. It already has the debate issues all lined up. Should we just..say, copy and paste something like that over to this wiki, and contextualize it in terms of party platforms and politicians? Should we then create an area for people to begin an informed debate, one that can be easily researched and factual thanks to the ready information available to them? If the point of this website is to raise the bar, we need to set the bar somewhere. At the moment, throwing out opinions is no better than any other blog. If I'm missing the point of this website, then what is the gay marriage topic supposed to be filled with, if not information regarding the different viewpoints, which can then be debated? Slacksimus 07:35, 6 July 2006 (UTC) Worldwide discussion I'd like to put a 'Tools' section in here, and widen the discussion to a worldwide one. Here in the UK, we have a great organisation called MySociety http://www.mysociety.org/ that makes some fantastic open democracy tools that maybe others can gain inspiration from. Things like http://www.pledgebank.com/ for gathering support; WriteToThem http://www.writetothem.com/ for writing to your MP, and a special Lords edition for writing to Peers; HearFromYourMP http://www.hearfromyourmp.com/ which encourages MPs to run mailing lists for their constituents. Then there's TheyWorkForYou http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ which allows you to find out what your MP has been saying in Parliament. I think there's huge value in sharing experiences from country to country. Of course, not all experiences will map accross - you couldn't do WriteToThem in Ireland, for example, because it works off postal codes and the Irish don't all use postal codes. But the ideas are worth sharing nonetheless. :I think that's a great idea. I'll copy these links to tools to start the page. Please expand it! Angela (talk) 08:05, 6 July 2006 (UTC) Can we go International with this? This Wiki reached Slashdot this morning (GMT) and a discussion is currently ongoing here. I posted a comment on the discussion regarding what I thought of the idea and if it could be widened to an International audience. Here's the content of the post: I think this is a good idea. It looks to have the potential to raise peoples awareness of the practise of politics and a central area where peoples opinions on political issues and agendas can be seen in near real time. Much different than the "write a letter to your congressman" or (in Ireland), "go meet with your local councillor", where you have to account for the time it takes for your opinion/issues to filter up and down the food chain. There is also the "mob mentality", whereby if enough people have the same views on a certain issue, then it has the potential to sway political thought. How about developing this further, into a Wiki for other nations and political regimes similar to (or dissimilar to) Republican Democracy. Note: Republican here means the method of democracy practised, not the party.